


Mad

by ChokolatteJedi



Series: Big Bang Inspirations [6]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Big Bang Challenge, Community: tv-universe, Death, Gen, Insanity, Introspection, Mental Anguish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:31:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/pseuds/ChokolatteJedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye must deal with another death</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mad

**Author's Note:**

> For the TV-Universe Big Bang Inspiration Challenge, inspired by the song title "I Just Wanna be Mad"

Hawkeye stared down at the young boy that Mulcahy was giving the last rites to. He had been his patient, but Hawkeye couldn't save him. He wasn't a hopeless case, like some of the boys who came through. And he hadn't had some horrible complication on the table, which sometimes happened. He hadn't even gotten one of the nasty, untreatable infections in Post-Op, which they had more than their fair share of. He had just slipped off to sleep one night and not woken back up.

Colonel Potter claimed to have encountered something like that before. He thought it was likely a birth defect - probably of the heart - that no one would have ever noticed in civilian life. But the stress of war and his injuries had become too much and pfft. It just stopped working properly. Nothing they could have done.

Right now, Hawkeye didn't care. He just _didn't care_.

He should be angry; he had been angry at death before, when he couldn't do anything about it. He should be sad; he often felt sadness for these young men, especially when their fate was out of his hands. The little, selfish corner of his brain should have even felt relief; if a heart defect was to blame, then it wasn't his fault that his patient had just never woken up. It wasn't because he missed something, or did something wrong; it was just death trying to screw up his batting average.

Instead, Hawkeye felt nothing. He felt like a great empty hole inside of him had opened up, and everything that anyone said just wooshed into it without making an impact. Sometimes, when he had wondered what going mad felt like, he had pictured a person whose mental insides had just stopped working. That was how he felt now.

Maybe he really was going crazy this time.

Hawkeye had been afraid of going crazy before. There was she sleepwalking thing, which Sidney had helped with. And of course the time he had made himself sick from his memories. Those times, he had been terrified of what the darkness inside him might represent. But each time Sidney and the rest of the camp had been there for him, pulling him back from the edge. And yes, he had joked about it before, too. There was that thing with Frank and the liver, the prank war, and the Gorilla suits, and he always encouraged Klinger, but this was different.

Before, Hawkeye had always fought against the temptation to go mad. He had viewed the madness as another enemy to be fought, like bureaucracy, death, and boredom. He had laughed in the face of it the same way he laughed in the face of death: because that was who he was.

This time he just wanted to sink into that oblivion and let it take him. Hawkeye just wanted to lie down and never get up again, or run around the camp yelling fire. Or just sit quietly in Radar's old office and hold his teddy bear. Something, and everything, and nothing all at once. He just wanted to crawl out of his own skin and find someone different to be.

This time, Hawkeye just wanted to go mad.


End file.
